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Loveland's passion: Battle blight

Map tech – aka 'blexting' – charts growth

Photo by ANTHONY BARCHOCKIt Takes a Team to Make Loveland
From left, back row: Mary Lorene Carter and her dog, Pasta Batman; Alex Alsup; Jerry Paffendorf; and Mike Evans. From left, front row: Larry Sheradon, Lauren Hood; and Sandra Yu.

Two years ago, Mary Lorene Carter and Jerry Paffendorf were eating ramen and sweating the cost of drinks at PJs Lager House. They were getting by — and funding their company, Loveland Technologies LLC — on Kickstarter campaigns, the occasional microgrant and the generosity of a few small investors.

Their signature website, Why Don't We Own This?, which maps property ownership and tax data, was just blossoming, and they were knocking on doors, trying to persuade anyone who would listen to let them make public data public.

"We spent a lot of time banging our head against the wall trying to get city departments to loosen up with their data," said Paffendorf, 32.

This year, they project revenue of $2.5 million. They've expanded Why Don't We Own This? into New Orleans and New York, with Chicago in development. And they've developed a technology that is the backbone of a $1.5 million city effort to fight blight.

What a difference 24 months can make.

For the past nine weeks, 50 crews of two — one driver, one surveyor — have been spotted around the city armed with Google Nexus 7 tablets "blexting" every property within Detroit's 139 square miles. From their cars, they point the tablet at the property, snap a photo and fill out a short questionnaire. Is the building vacant or inhabited? Is there a structure? Is the condition "good," "fair," "poor" or "recommend demolition"?

When the surveyors hit send, the information is beamed back to Mission Control at TechTown Detroit's New Center campus.

A property has just been blexted. "Blight" + "texting" = "blexting."

This is Loveland's technology. Co-founder Larry Sheradon and web developer Michael Evans built the back-end system and smartphone app that made it possible for the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force to map and catalogue 385,000 properties in less than nine weeks.

Back at headquarters, the Loveland staff and a quality control team watch the live feed of blexted properties coming in, checking for errors or glitches. They can tell, for example, if a smudged lens is making an image unreadable. They then can call the surveyor immediately to ask questions.

The team is completing the final "mosquito bite" surveying, as Carter calls it, zeroing in on precise properties it wants to double check. But by late this week, the Motor City Mapping Project should be complete. The task force expects to make its recommendations, based on the survey data, to Mayor Mike Duggan and Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr by the end of March.

Glenda Price, president of the Detroit Public Schools Foundation

"This has been done in a really extraordinary period of time," said Glenda Price, president of the Detroit Public Schools Foundation.

First impression

Price discovered Loveland Technologies last fall at a meeting of the Blight Removal Task Force, which she co-chairs.

The task force was formed in September, when the Obama administration announced that it would target more than $300 million in grants and private-sector money to help Detroit. Half of that total was set aside for fighting blight, and a task force was created to develop a plan. Tapped to lead it were Price; Dan Gilbert, founder and chairman of Rock Ventures LLC; and Linda Smith, executive director of U-SNAP-BAC Inc., a nonprofit housing corporation.

Few people on the committee had heard of Loveland, let alone that Paffendorf was a mastermind behind the campaign to manufacture and install a 10-foot-tall bronze statue of Robocop, a Detroit version of Rocky on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

But the Loveland crew wowed them when they presented their blexting technology and recommended a full-scale mapping project as a way to answer some of the questions vexing the committee: How many properties are blighted? How many are abandoned?

"We knew that whatever we said had to have some legitimacy to it, and that we had to back it up with some real data, some real hard numbers," Price said.

The task force quickly commissioned a $1.5 million survey of the city's parcels, paid for by the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, the Kresge Foundation, the Skillman Foundation and Rock Ventures. The money would cover the cost of 150 tablets, quality assurance teams, surveyors, overhead and the services of Loveland Technologies.

Loveland would collaborate with Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit funded by the Kresge and Skillman foundations, to execute the survey. Loveland would handle the property data collection while D3 would be responsible for scrubbing and delivering the info. D3 would also pull in other sources of information — like a database from the U.S. Postal Service that shows whether mail has been successfully delivered to a property in the past 90 days — to overlay on Loveland's property survey.

"Bringing all of that information together will allow us to develop a blight removal plan for the entire city," said Erica Raleigh, director of Data Driven Detroit.

Chris Uhl, the Skillman Foundation

Money for a model

Chris Uhl had admired Loveland Technologies since he joined the Skillman Foundation in 2012 as vice president of social innovation. He saw the power of the blexting and data-visualization tools and wanted to get them into wider use.

He got his chance last year.

The Skillman Foundation and the nonprofit Blight Authority, which is separate from the Blight Removal Task Force, were looking at blight removal in the Brightmoor neighborhood. However, selecting which buildings to demolish proved to be challenging.

"There were four of us driving around in a car eyeballing the neighborhood," said Uhl. "We went back to the community center and unfurled a map and then tried to remember where the hell we were. What we were trying to do was build a system that we could scale across the city (to show blighted properties). We couldn't do it relying on maps like that."

He knew if he brought Loveland together with Data Driven Detroit, they could create a better map. So he asked two groups to execute a parcel survey of Brightmoor using the then-beta blexting technology.

To get Loveland the financial resources to scale, Skillman made a $100,000 grant.

"They had a great technology and a great little company, but they were in search of a revenue model," Uhl said. "Their initial model was opening Why Don't We Own This? to community groups, but that's hard to monetize in any way they can scale. They can take this technology nationwide."

And Skillman wants a piece of Loveland's future: It is contemplating taking an equity stake in the company. It would join Loveland's three other angel investors, who have put in about $300,000.

The Skillman board of directors is still debating the investment, but if it agrees, it would be the first deal of its kind for the foundation.

"Detroit is on the cutting edge of these types of things," Uhl said. "We have the problems here that are of a scale that don't exist in other places. So it's a great place to pair two great companies like this with some capital and get them solving."

That Brightmoor pilot survey formed the basis of what Loveland and D3 would eventually show the blight task force as a proof-of-concept of what could be done citywide.

It also taught everyone a few things. Primary lesson learned: Technologists have the latest and greatest things; regular humans do not.

The blexting software worked on the latest smartphones, but when the Brightmoor volunteers used it on their older devices, it kept crashing the system. For the citywide mapping project, the task force invested in 150 Google tablets.

Strength in numbers

Fast Company magazine recently named Loveland one of the world's most innovative companies. Another Rust Belt city has approached the company about doing a similar survey.

To handle the interest, the company has been slowly growing. This month, it added two new employees, bringing the total team to seven.

"It's been great finally having some resources to work with," said Carter, 31. "When we brought on our fourth employee last year, it was a big gamble, it was nailbiting."

One of the newest hires is a "chief parcel officer" who can execute their vision of bringing every property in the country online. They are also planning a new Why Don't We Own This?-style website that will feature a Loveland USA map of those parcels.

The company also has hired Lauren Hood to be the community engagement director, someone who can act as a liaison between the technologists and the people who actually use and need the data.

"Working with open data and data that comes from the government, I think that we necessarily take on the role of a quasi-governmental organization, and so the voice of the people is important," said Paffendorf. "We are visualizing public information, so there is a kind of ethical code that comes with doing that."

Loveland will also have to differentiate itself in a market that has Seattle-based Socrata Inc., which raised $18 million last year and calls the United Nations a client. Locally, Loveland has a potential competitor in startup Local Data, founded in 2012 by Detroit Code for America fellows Matt Hampel, Alicia Rouault and Prashant Singh.

Local Data managed a small companion survey to the Motor City Mapping Project for the Michigan Historic Preservation Network. That group needed to survey 18,000 properties in potential historic districts, giving them "historic preservation scores" and have the data included in the report to the task force.

"It was an opportunity to provide a perspective that isn't always included," said Emilie Evans, preservation specialist with the network.

Initially the network hoped to work with Loveland, but the team didn't have the capacity, Evans said. So she selected Local Data, which was able to perform the survey for free as a vendor of Data Driven Detroit. Local Data worked with 75 volunteers over two weeks to assess the properties. Then the data was turned over to D3 and Loveland for integration into the final report.

"Historically we've seen Loveland providing a lot of that base data to the public, and we were providing the data collection through our Web-based dashboard," said Hempel.

More mapping

Loveland is in talks with the blight task force for phase two of the Motor City Mapping Project, which would make the data publicly accessible and updatable. Where the database will be housed and how it will be maintained is still being negotiated, however.

"There is too much time, energy and money that has been invested to allow this to simply be a one-time thing," said task force co-chair Price.

Loveland is also making the rounds of Detroit's city departments in hopes that its technology can be used to layer on many data sets, not just property information.

"We are at the heart of the conversations about how to get on top of the data problem, how to involve residents with solutions and how we can upgrade systems," Paffendorf said.

Those conversations are far different than two years ago.

"I think we started to notice a difference, honestly, with the emergency manager," Paffendorf said. "A lot more departments are displaying the thinking where it's like, OK, maybe we're not playing protect-the-bacon any more. We're going to start playing the game of being the best in the world."

They have an ally in the Wayne County treasurer's office. Chief Deputy Treasurer David Szymanski waives all fees for the property data that power Why Don't We Own This?

"There was a lot of reluctance to share information with groups like this, but we identified them as good actors," Syzmanski said. "We took a look at the model, what they had put together without our cooperation. These guys were out there trying to use county data and make it available to everybody. They were leveling the playing field."

Starting by inches

When Paffendorf, Carter and Sheradon bought their first vacant lot in 2009, they didn't anticipate the plot of land on Detroit's east side would lead them here. At the time, they were just playing around with selling square inches of their land for $1, making the buyers "inchvestors" in Detroit.

"It was a time of high imagination, high playfulness, high open-mindedness about what you might do with a crowd of people and a vacant lot," Paffendorf said. "We relatively quickly learned the bigger picture at play wasn't this one lot. We'd kind of stumbled into this whole system of property in the city that really needed to be understood better."

To launch the inches project, he turned to a new crowdfunding site called Kickstarter. Inches became one of the first dozen campaigns to be listed on the site, which has since raised more than $850 million for creative projects.

Since that first successful fundraiser, Paffendorf and team have raised more than $91,000, including $67,436 for the Robocop statue, which was done as a separate side project from Loveland Technologies.

"The guys at Loveland Technologies were some of the early pioneers of Kickstarter," said Kickstarter spokeswoman Julie Wood. "They helped prove the viability of a new system and a new way to bring creative projects to life. There have now been more than 56,000 successful projects on Kickstarter, and it's safe to assume that at least a few of those ideas were inspired by Loveland and the cool things they've done."

That first inches campaign raised just $1,582, but it led to a passion for property data that Loveland sees as key to solving so many city problems, from vacant homes to services.

"There is a real opportunity to address these problems, not just muddle along and come out OK," said Alex Alsup, Loveland's chief product officer. "But we can really set a national standard for how these kinds of issues are approached. And it started in Detroit."

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated their projected revenue. It is $2.5 million.